Are we still reading code?

People are starting to coin the term ADLC or Agentic Development Lifecycle. A lot of this seems to be combining two things: Day-to-day software engineering has completely changed from a process perspective Bottlenecks in the traditional SDLC are starting to show I don't think we need yet another acronym, but let's talk about how things are changing in general and what some of the bottlenecks are. We don't work on a single task anymore One of the overarching changes, leading to an explosion in lines of code, merge requests and more, is that the cost of software engineering has dramatically decreased. So much so that all of us can now do the job of multiple engineers without hiring them. As part of this change, our daily workflows have changed completely. We no longer open an IDE and work on a single task, start to finish. Instead, our roles have become a lot more exploratory and, quite frankly, fun. My workflow, for example, has shifted towards opening multiple chat sessions, often separate threads on the same topic. I get to spar like some sort of boxer with AI over a few variations of how I've been looking at the same problem. After a while, I'll start to narrow that down to one or two threads containing the desired architecture or strategy to solve the goal. From that point, I'm running this smaller set of agents end-to-end with validation criteria until a passing merge request is opened for each. Running this same process in parallel across 3-4 topics leads to 8-10 merge requests within a day . And because this process has become so easy, these merge requests are often meaty. Not just one-liners. Previously, you'd dedicate your day to working on a particular problem over a longer horizon, whereas now the amount of output (whether it's valuable output or not) has dramatically increased. If you frame software engineering as problem solving, where most problems contain local minima, not absolute minima (a metaphor about gradient descent) , then the really fun part i